Sunday, June 4, 2017

Letters of Marque and Reprisal – Chapter 1

Letters of Marque and Reprisal is an original, light-hearted, espionage story. It resides within a self-contained universe. I am publishing it serially at Liberate Liberty and simultaneously at Liberty Island Magazine, and I will do so on an irregular schedule.

*****

Chapter 1:

Bill Navarro stood outside the bus door, just to the side closest to the engine. “Over there,” he kept saying as people flowed off the bus. He didn’t have to say it. He didn’t have to have point at the spot where he wanted them either. It was just a short distance away and once the first person reached it, it became obvious where the rest of them should go. But he kept doing it until everyone had exited. All 50 of them or so. He climbed up the steps and stood next to the bus driver, quickly glancing from front to back to verify it was empty. Then he hopped outside again.

He unbuttoned the middle button of his suit jacket. “You know what to do,” he said to the group of people who milled around with their signs and other items while they talked—or at least vocalized—loudly.

“You ain’t coming with us?” one of them said to Bill.

“Of course not.”

“Figures,” the man sneered as he tapped his sign on the ground. A white woman next to him started shaking her head back and forth, the dreadlocks of her long hair whipping around like a dirty mop.

They had paid all these jackasses and yet they still weren’t happy. It wasn’t just the idiot who had rudely addressed him. Bill could see it in the eyes of a lot of the other ones. But then again, their repulsiveness is what made them right for this job. . . .